Drama: an actor’s education by John Lithgow
You may recognize John Lithgow as an award-winning actor on stage, in movies and on television, or even as the author of eight children’s books. His latest book, Drama: An Actor’s Education, is a very personal memoir of his life as an actor, rather than an autobiography. Lithgow prefaces the book with the month he spent as a caregiver to his 86-year old father. His father was having a difficult recovery from surgery and seemed to have lost the will to live, until Lithgow rediscovered the family’s favorite short story book. In a moment of inspiration, he read to his father one of the stories his father used to read to him – P.G. Wodehouse’s Uncle Fred Flits By. His father laughed, began to recover, and Lithgow had a revelation about the importance of storytelling and acting as a career.
This memoir is a tribute to his father, Arthur Lithgow, who was also an actor, director, and producer of many Shakespeare festivals and summer repertory companies. Arthur achieved some respect but not much success in his theater career. The family was constantly moving and living on the edge financially. Lithgow first describes these days from a child’s viewpoint of fun, and then with the more realistic insight of a mature adult. I enjoyed John Lithgow’s tales of growing up in summer theater, as I have spent many summers doing Shakespeare with my family, although on a more amateur level. Many of his tales describe the difficulties common to any young person who is constantly moving from school to school and trying to fit in. Lithgow learned to act his way to popularity and acceptance in school and later on Broadway. Very few actors attain the level of success of Lithgow, and as you would expect, the story of his acting life is a tale of skill, hard work, and what seem to be random chances. I recommend this very personal book which is also one man’s musing on the arts and why they are important.
Some of you may remember when Joe Paddock and others from the Minnesota Historical Society came to the Quad-Cities when this book first came out in 2001. It’s taken me this long to actually read this fascinating biography. Most of it is Ernest Oberholtzer’s own words taken from his journals, letters, and oral interviews with Paddock providing commentary in between.
Winchester is one of my favorite narrative nonfiction authors. You never know what subject he’ll be expounding on next. Whatever strikes his fancy, you know he’ll be using lots of unfamiliar and interesting words. This book displays Winchester’s love of the English language, but more than that, it’s a good story about the creation of a dictionary. Dictionaries probably don’t appeal to the general public all that much. In and of themselves, they can be a dry subject. We think of them merely as tools. Murder and insanity, however, seem to arouse a lot of interest. Winchester is a genius for putting those subjects together in a book that delights the general reader. 
